Garth Stein discusses his New York Times literary best seller

Looking for literary fiction that reads like a contemporary novel heavy on entertainment and drama?  The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is a novel you should consider.  The novel is narrated by a dog named Enzo, who believes he will one day be reincarnated as a human. 

If you missed the first part of Garth Stein's interview, please check it out.

In The Art of Racing in the Rain, Enzo, a dog, is the narrator, but there is a great deal of racing terminology and metaphor in the novel.  Was it difficult to juggle the racing information from a point of view of a dog?  How did you navigate the difficulties?

It wasn't difficult at all.  Once I embraced the idea that Enzo spends his time watching television and learning from TV shows, it was quite easy to give him the knowledge he needed to make the racing metaphor work.

Photo Credit:  Frank Huster

As a dog owner myself, I've often though a look from my dog expressed his feelings or his ideas about what was going on around him.  I've often wondered if all dog owners feel this way about their pets.  If you own dogs, did you use them as models for Enzo's behaviors and expressions?

Not so much.  First of all, I had to write a character, not a concept.  So Enzo is a character.  He is a nearly human soul trapped in a dog's body.  He's extremely frustrated by his inability to interact with the world around him in a way he would like, and he would rather move on to his next incarnation.  

But he has a great love for his family, so he wants to stay.  He's a perfect double-bound character.  Now, after I had that, I need to work some doggie stuff in.  Those of us who have dogs know they have a great non-verbal vocabulary of gestures.  I took some from my own dog, but others I made up.

Enzo seems like a wise soul believing in reincarnation and knowing about the custody battle and other dramas going on in Denny's life.  If Enzo was someone else before he became a dog, who would he have been?

I have no idea.  Gandhi?  Or maybe a great writer.  Maybe Rudyard Kipling.

In the last scenes of the novel, the narration seems to break away from Enzo.  Who is that final narrator and how did you reconcile that break in the narration?

I believe you're referring to the epilogue, which has an omniscient narrator.  It is identified as an epilogue by it's title, "Imola, Italy," instead of a chapter number.  It's a single chapter and it takes place after the scope of the novel.  It is not integral to the plot, and, in fact, doesn't even have to be included in the narrative for the narrative to work; it is there simply to illuminate the fates of some of the characters. 

For a full review of The Art of Racing in the Rain, check out Savvy Verse & Wit, The Literate Housewife Review, Books on the Brain, Booking Mama, and Jen's Book Thoughts.